Freedom.

Lately, God has been showing me a bounty of beautiful truths, but one that has been particularly applicable is the freedom I have found in Christ...a phrase which I can no longer say lightly.

For a few weeks this May, my thoughts were almost completely consumed with my appearance and I felt so terribly, hopelessly ugly. (I am not saying this for you to reply "Don't say that! You're lovely!" or anything...I'm just saying how I felt at the time.) However, in a short amount of time, God gave me a much deeper understanding of the weight of my sin, His wrath, Jesus' sacrifice, and the beautiful justice and mercy displayed there. And the more I fell in love with the Gospel, God was slowly chipping away my insecurities until one day it totally hit me that I didn't care much at all about my appearance anymore. I suddenly realized that my thoughts were now (mostly) bent towards what looked good to JESUS...and God doesn't really care if my eyes are green or not since He made them and deemed them perfect the way they are! He didn't mess up when He made the majestic universe, so obviously He didn't mess up when He made me...

Anyways, I soon realized that satisfaction in the Gospel is a FREEDOM that I had not really previously known.

Friends, listen to the awesomeness of Psalm 34 verses 8-10:

O taste and see that the LORD is good;
How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!
O fear the LORD, you His saints;
For to those who fear Him there is no want.
The young lions do lack and suffer hunger;
But they who seek the LORD shall not be in want of any good thing.

Those who find satisfaction in God alone don't feel like they're missing out on things like money or good looks or popularity or boyfriends or anything like that. A friend once bluntly stated, "If Jesus doesn't supply it, you don't need it!" He has supplied Himself, and He is more than sufficient. The more that Christ consumes us, the less we care about anything except what makes Him happy! It's refreshing to find that kind of freedom.

Do you want to know what else is pretty crazy about finding freedom in Christ? Romans 8:15 says that before we came to salvation, our souls were crying out in pain, begging for freedom from this slavery to sin. Though the world can try to tell us that freedom is found in doing what makes you happy, I think we all from experience can testify that sin is truly suffocating. (And do not think that I am just talking about drugs and premarital sex; I'm referring to everyday struggles like disrespect or laziness or gossip or Facebook addiction...) But now, for those of us who are in Christ, God has REPLACED that helpless spirit with one of adoption, which is now instead crying out praises to our Father!

Have you ever really thought about this? We were like an orphan child, hopeless and hurting...then Jesus chose us by paying the highest price (namely, Himself!) for us. Have we done anything to deserve this? NO! One of my friends always says that if salvation was 99.99% God and .01% us, every single person on this earth would still be condemned to hell, for all have sinned and fallen short of God's prefect standard! (Romans 3:23)

There is no way we could pay our debt on our own, so Jesus, in all His glory, had to come to this earth to die for the sins of those didn't even know Him---much less love Him---yet. He did live 33 years sin-free, but He did not live 33 years temptation-free. He can empathize with our strugggles, which we often forget (Hebrews 4:15), except the difference between His response to temptations and ours is that He never failed!

The Gospel is so powerful. Christ unites in ways that no motivational book or speaker or any kind of counseling could ever unite. In a marriage, if the husband and wife have polar opposite interests and personalities, their relationship will still be strong if the Gospel is their center. Something I so fear about my senior class at church is that we are falsely united, getting along when we have to but completely leaving God out of the equation. (Plus we shouldn't just be united as a class, but rather as a body of believers regardless of the grade we are in.) We must be united in the Gospel, and even if Jesus is the only thing we have in common, that is more than enough to have in common.

So I encourage you, if your spirit is still crying out for freedom from sin, cry out to the LORD and repent! (That does not mean apologize; that means CHANGE.) And if you are already a child of God, I really want to encourage you to find the freedom found in considering God "enough." You do this by earnestly seeking Him, as it says in the Psalms...by valuing Him more than the things that we once held dear. He is all that is good.